Can You Even Survive a Global Famine?

No global supply networks affect more people than those for food. Food production and distribution is the world’s largest industry, employing over a billion people. For most of those living in wealthy northern countries, global food systems seem to be working fine. After all, a consumer in New York or Paris can buy a cantaloupe in the middle of win

The historian Anne Applebaum’s book on the Holodomor, Red Famine, documents stories of desperate peasants resorting to eating leather and rodents, grass, and, in states of starvation-induced mania, even their own children. All of this occurred in one of the most fertile grain-production regions in the world.

The most influential pessimist in modern economic thinking has no doubt been Thomas Robert Malthus, an English pastor writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Malthus famously warned against trying to improve the lot of the poor, and even against the chances for long-term economic progress. He argued that following any rise in